What if the boss goes on facebook saying how hot his secretary is and would like to hook up with her? Would that be protected speech, too? I'm pretty sure he would still get charged with harassment and get fired.
The "9 million saved lives" figure he is touting is the prediction of how many future lives will be saved once the malaria vaccines etc. complete their development, pass their clinical trials, and become widespread.
"Over this decade, we believe unbelievable progress can be made, in both inventing new vaccines and making sure they get out to all the children who need them. We could cut the number of children who die every year from about 9 million to half of that, if we have success on it"
Actually, he makes the statement, as you quoted, that there are 9 million deaths a year and that we could cut that in half. Unfortunately, those 9 million are not all from infectious diseases that could be eradicated with a vaccine. For children under 5, the most vulnerable, according to the WHO, the top two would be malaria and measles. Together, these comprise 450,000 deaths. Also according to the WHO, the largest killer is malnutrition. This amounts to approximately 1 million deaths in that age group and can not be cured with a vaccine.
Mr.Gates should be commended for his work, but the numbers he uses are not realistic. I imagine what he has done is mixed figures for children and adults, but then why refer to saving children, alone?
And none of what he is doing/saying addresses the issue of corrupt regimes who receive the funding to purchase the vaccinations but use it for other things.
First, the report you show is five years old. The WHO's latest numbers are for 2008. In 2008, according to the WHO, 164,000 children died from measles. I am not disputing that (or the 2005) numbers. What I am disputing is that withholding the MMR vaccine is killing millions of children each year. While millions of children under the age of 5 may die each year, 54% of them are from malnutrition, not lack of vaccines. Of the causes listed, only measles and malaria have vaccines. That accounts for about 12% of the deaths or roughly 480,000. Still a lot, but far short of millions.
Then to complicate it further, most of those children are not inoculated, not because of fear of vaccines, but because there are no vaccines available, either for political reasons or financial ones.
Finally, elsewhere on the WHO site you will find reports that it is not actually the measles that kill the children but the complications of being in such a weakened state from malnutrition and then contracting the measles.
As I stated previously, I fully support Mr. Gates and his philanthropy, but it is important to get the numbers right, if he wants to have real credibility. The real cause of all of this is not vaccines or virus' but the real scourge of poverty that exists in most of the world.
I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil. ~ Robert Kennedy
"It is an affront to our common humanity, five years after the the Millennium Summit, that 30,000 children die each day from easily preventable diseases, or that 100 million people go to bed hungry, or that 100 million children are not receiving a basic education." Bertie Ahern, Taoiseach, speaking to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2005.
I agree whole heartedly. However, their deaths are not caused by the lack of the MMR vaccine. To quote Robert Kennedy "I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil."
The question has been posed "Is setting up an off-shore IT help desk ethical?" Wouldn't that be as ethical as say, Honda or Toyota setting up an off-shore (from their native country) manufacturing plant, say in the US?
Nobody likes it, but companies, 1) aren't people, so really don't have moral or ethical base and 2) will shift resources to wherever they will result in the most profits. If you want to ask a real ethics question,then it would be better phrased as "Is it ethical to invest in a company that sets up an off-shore IT help desk?" Then you are talking about individuals making choices that basically are choosing their own personal gain vs somebody else's.
I am all for Mr. Gates philanthropy. However, the World Health Organization reports 164,000 deaths per year from measles (which is the leading cause of death among children), not the millions claimed by Mr. Gates. In addition, WHO reports that 83% of all children are vaccinated against the measles and that those who aren't are mainly poor countries without access.
One only has to do a brief search of ancestory.com to see that the former governer of Alaska is not the first Sarah Palin to exist. Therefore, wouldn't that fall under prior art?
In their never ending quest to Make The World A Better Place, the do-gooders continue to dig us into an ever-deeper hole Because It's For The Children.
One of the biggest problems with big government solutions to everything is the difficulty involved in making changes as needed. Every decision requires congressional approval, every decision becomes political and once the decision is made nobody has a choice. Public education is a classic example of how such a system loses focus on it's primary reason for existence, i.e. educating children. I instead it becomes a vessel for social engineering experiments and and the political interests of the teacher's unions and politicians du jour.. The children themselves have essentially no representation as the various powers that be fight to further their agendas.
The worst part is that you can't buy or legislate the single biggest predictor of academic success: parental involvement. No amount of money, no law, no program can motivate parents to get more deeply involved in their kid's education. You can not change parents that want to dump their kids and attendant responsibilities onto the school districts.
What do gooders are you referring to? I'm pretty sure that liberals and conservatives (instead of the non-descriptive do-gooders title) both have forced their various agendas on to public education. You then go on to blame the parents, and yet, control of their child's education has been removed from them. Fifty years ago, local school boards managed their schools. Yes, they had agendas, but they were local agendas. Not some state or federal system. The local system was not perfect, but to improve it, it got replaced with today's administration from afar. If you want parents to take more responsibility for their child's education, then you also need to give them more authority.
Of course doing this means that in some places kids will not be taught about evolution, birth control or whatever. It might even mean that some kids won't be academically ready to go to college. That was the system that was in place that educated a nation that was able to send a man to the moon. Education, then was a limited resource, just like oil is today. Back then, you got an education to move ahead of the pack. Today, you need an education just to maintain your place in the pack.
But, I digress. What do-gooders are you referring to and what agendas have they forced?
The problem is, following your reasoning, that taken to its logical conclusion, there will be no manufacturing business left in the United States. Why, because labor is so much cheaper overseas. So, yes, the government could keep out and let wages follow supply and demand. With such a large supply, overall wages decrease dramatically. Then there aren't enough consumer dollars to purchase goods and services, which causes more layoffs and things continue to spiral downward.
Right now, the middle class does not have enough purchasing power to sustain the economy (unless they borrow). The economy requires exporting goods to other countries. As manufacturing shrinks, in the above scenario and in real life, what is available to export decreases, too. Ultimately, there are two choices either we accept high unemployment (and the associated government subsidies) or we all accept a significantly lower standard of living.
There is, actually, a third option. Accept a flat standard of living until the rest of the world catches up at which time amercian labor will be competitive with emerging markets. However, to most people, that would seem no different than a lower standard of living.
Unemployment is at record highs, how many more people would you want out of work if the government hadn't stepped in?
And what happens if Amazon and B&N just say screw it to Apple? Sure, they will lose sales to iPhone and iPad users, but what happens to the luster of an iPad when it no longer can get ebooks except from Apple? Apple isn't the only player in town. There are a lot of android devices, and not just phones out there or coming very, very soon.
What you described is exactly what is supposed to happen in a healthy free market driven economy. It's just the life cycle of a company. What I still can't get my head around is where the US government gets involved in "bailing out" these aging companies. Had we just let nature take it's course, we'd have less major auto manufacturers and the door would be open for innovation - but I guess we have to put that off and wait another several years for the bailout money to run dry.
What you say is true, but leaves out the human suffering that goes along with it. If people were able to freely locate wherever jobs were at the time they were needed, that would minimize the suffering. There is an excellent book titled Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, by Robert Reich that goes into much more detail than I could ever go through here. It should be a must read for every politician and anyone interested in the US's economic growth.
Back when "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", they had an exodus of top talent, too -- just before things went south for the company. Luckily, they were in the process of repositioning them self as a service company instead of a hardware company.
Both companies followed the same "fat-cat" syndrome. Small lean company innovates and captures a large part of the market. As company grows, focus shifts to maintaining status quo. Company becomes too large and lazy (fat cat) to respond quickly to changing environment. Somebody else becomes the new lean tiger. Pattern repeats for new comer. Fat cat isn't just for technology companies. It happens in all industries. It's just that change occurs so quickly in technology companies that instead of taking decades to be toppled, it happens in years. Both IBM and Microsoft lasted longer at the top of their game than most technology companies, but the same forces are still at work.
Back when they were trying to bust up Microsoft for being a monopoly (again, same thing happened to IBM), was when they needed to change. Microsoft had the opportunity to get rid of all competition with Office by improving the product. Instead, they chose to change file formats to try and make the competitors incompatible. That is a very short sighted solution, as it also makes your own installed product base incompatible. Next, they re-did the interface, but still didn't really improve upon the functionality. Next they played around with pricing structures and actually started to remove features, accept for the top end product. Again, not a long term growth strategy. A similar scenario played out with the browser and the OS itself.
Meanwhile, others in the tech industry have been chipping away at Microsoft. Nobody is saying that OpenOffice/LibreOffice will topple Microsoft Office. It doesn't have to. Just like Mozilla, Safari and now Chrome, it only has to take a percentage of small percentage of market share to make a big impact on Microsoft's bottom line.
It's like the prevent defense in football (American Football, that is). It may keep the opposing team from making the big play, but gives up a tremendous amount of yardage in the process. Then, one small mistake and the opposing team scores.
Microsoft, like many before it, has become too large and inflexible to adjust to quick change in the modern market and relies on protecting itself with a prevent defense. The problem with that is that in football, you only need to keep the other team from scoring until the clock runs out. In business, there is no clock to signal the end of the game.
What about COBOL and the Mainframe? I've been hearing how they've both been dead since the early 1980s. Surely, with all of the press given to the death of these to tools, they are no longer in use in the new millennium. (He says sarcastically)
Cars appear more efficient from a user perspective for all the reason you mention FOR MOVING PEOPLE. They are actually less efficient but they are more practical for that purpose. However, the actual article, is about moving goods, not people. Cars, electric or not, will never be more efficient than truck, which will never be as efficient as rail for moving freight.
And I'm in a town of 300,000 in the midwest, with over a million people in the metro area. There's a bus stop right in front of my house that I have never once used because it is completely worthless. It doesn't go anywhere I have ever wanted to go. It doesn't go anywhere at anything resembling a reasonable rate of speed. And it costs like $2/trip, which is more than gas and maintenance on a relatively efficient car. Even the bus systems in cities of 2 million people are fairly worthless if you have to commute or need to get someplace faster than riding a bicycle.
Hmmm, the IRS calculates $0.50/mile to operate a vehicle including the cost of insurance and depreciation of the vehicle. That would mean that for $2 a trip, anything over 4 miles saves you money if you don't drive your car. With gas costing $2 to $3 a gallon, it's easy to see your disdain for public transportation (a bus was just an example). When it gets to $10/gallon, like in Europe, then people may view it differently.
Of course car pooling is much more efficient than a single drive vehicle. Too bad most people don't do it. How many married couples each drive their own car into town to go to work.
I check with the local transportation department and was told that the buses here average between 10 and 12 mpg, so that is the figure I used. I'm sure why they are so much worse where you live. However, assuming those 9 people on the bus were going ten miles, then the bus used 1.7 gallons of fuel. On the other hand, if those 9 people drove the 10 miles each in their own car and were able to get 24 mpg, then they would have used 3.75 gallons of fuel. So, even at only 9 passengers, the bus uses less than half the fuel and have the cost per person (10 miles at $0.50/mile = $5 for the same trip by car).
As for having to walk a mile or stand around in the weather, well, when I lived on the East coast, that was the norm. Guess all of those people in NY riding the bus and train just don't know they are doing.
Buses work just fine in rural America. Greyhound goes right through town here. Schools use buses, too. However, it is true that many small towns are so small that they don't have bus service or any other mass transit. In those cases, single passenger vehicles become a necessity, but not because they are more efficient.
Actually, though, a bus with 4 passengers that gets 10mpg would still be more efficient than those four people driving four cars getting 25mpg. To go 25 miles, the first one will use 2.5 gallons of gas, the 4 cars will use 4 gallons to cover the same distance.
For the record, I am in a town of 20,000 in the midwest - we have bus and rail service, but I agree, not everywhere does.
You stated "...that with slower speed limits, I think you'd have just as many accidents (car to car ones at least)..."
However, the actual data shows that at slower speeds there are fewer accidents. I'm not talking about driving 30mph instead of 70mph, but something as basic as 55mph or 60mph.
The reason fatalities drop with lower speed limits are twofold. First, fewer accidents means fewer opportunities to be killed in the accident. Second, slower speeds equates to less force being applied, thereby reducing what isn't absorbed by the vehicle to the occupant.
Advanced technology still does not change the results. Brakes that let you stop in 80% of the time at 70mph, will still let you stop sooner at 60mph, thereby still giving the benefit to the slower speed. Or put a different way, an innovation like ABS works better for all speeds, not just high speeds.
The physics are always the same, slower speed means more time to respond to whatever may be happening.
Confiscation then? And a court order preventing you from purchasing another?
Again, if you are willing to throw out the constitution and the rights it grants, the courts can do anything they want. However, most people would be opposed to creating such a system as they value the rights the constitution gives them.
I agree with this. This is where electric cars are headed. It would make much more sense to abandon high-speed rail in favor of some proof of concept installations of something like this.
Cars are the least efficient mode of transport. A city bus, even though it gets terrible mileage per gallon, is more efficient in transporting people than the best hybrid. Plus, left out of the equation of all electric cars is usually the cost of producing the energy to charge the batteries. California is already realizing that to meet their requirements for all electric vehicles will require major upgrades to the power grid and transmission lines.
VW just announced a hybrid that is supposed to get 261mpg. If it succeeds at that, it will almost reach the efficiency of transporting a person that the current city bus does, but is still a long way behind the efficiency per person of Amtrak or the airlines.
No way about it, cars, transporting one or two people will never be an efficient use of energy.
Slashdot Mirror
What if the boss goes on facebook saying how hot his secretary is and would like to hook up with her? Would that be protected speech, too? I'm pretty sure he would still get charged with harassment and get fired.
What if they did it in the newspaper as a letter to the editor? People have been fired for that and it has been upheld. What makes it different on FB?
The "9 million saved lives" figure he is touting is the prediction of how many future lives will be saved once the malaria vaccines etc. complete their development, pass their clinical trials, and become widespread.
Actually, he makes the statement, as you quoted, that there are 9 million deaths a year and that we could cut that in half. Unfortunately, those 9 million are not all from infectious diseases that could be eradicated with a vaccine. For children under 5, the most vulnerable, according to the WHO, the top two would be malaria and measles. Together, these comprise 450,000 deaths. Also according to the WHO, the largest killer is malnutrition. This amounts to approximately 1 million deaths in that age group and can not be cured with a vaccine.
Mr.Gates should be commended for his work, but the numbers he uses are not realistic. I imagine what he has done is mixed figures for children and adults, but then why refer to saving children, alone?
And none of what he is doing/saying addresses the issue of corrupt regimes who receive the funding to purchase the vaccinations but use it for other things.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs286/en/
First, the report you show is five years old. The WHO's latest numbers are for 2008. In 2008, according to the WHO, 164,000 children died from measles. I am not disputing that (or the 2005) numbers. What I am disputing is that withholding the MMR vaccine is killing millions of children each year. While millions of children under the age of 5 may die each year, 54% of them are from malnutrition, not lack of vaccines. Of the causes listed, only measles and malaria have vaccines. That accounts for about 12% of the deaths or roughly 480,000. Still a lot, but far short of millions.
Then to complicate it further, most of those children are not inoculated, not because of fear of vaccines, but because there are no vaccines available, either for political reasons or financial ones.
Finally, elsewhere on the WHO site you will find reports that it is not actually the measles that kill the children but the complications of being in such a weakened state from malnutrition and then contracting the measles.
As I stated previously, I fully support Mr. Gates and his philanthropy, but it is important to get the numbers right, if he wants to have real credibility. The real cause of all of this is not vaccines or virus' but the real scourge of poverty that exists in most of the world.
I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil. ~ Robert Kennedy
The article references the measles vaccine and the WHO claims it is the leading cause of death among children.
"It is an affront to our common humanity, five years after the the Millennium Summit, that 30,000 children die each day from easily preventable diseases, or that 100 million people go to bed hungry, or that 100 million children are not receiving a basic education." Bertie Ahern, Taoiseach, speaking to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2005.
I agree whole heartedly. However, their deaths are not caused by the lack of the MMR vaccine. To quote Robert Kennedy "I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil."
The question has been posed "Is setting up an off-shore IT help desk ethical?" Wouldn't that be as ethical as say, Honda or Toyota setting up an off-shore (from their native country) manufacturing plant, say in the US?
Nobody likes it, but companies, 1) aren't people, so really don't have moral or ethical base and 2) will shift resources to wherever they will result in the most profits. If you want to ask a real ethics question,then it would be better phrased as "Is it ethical to invest in a company that sets up an off-shore IT help desk?" Then you are talking about individuals making choices that basically are choosing their own personal gain vs somebody else's.
I am all for Mr. Gates philanthropy. However, the World Health Organization reports 164,000 deaths per year from measles (which is the leading cause of death among children), not the millions claimed by Mr. Gates. In addition, WHO reports that 83% of all children are vaccinated against the measles and that those who aren't are mainly poor countries without access.
I know the latest thing people patent is intellectual property, but wouldn't that be an oxymoron where Sarah Palin is concerned?
One only has to do a brief search of ancestory.com to see that the former governer of Alaska is not the first Sarah Palin to exist. Therefore, wouldn't that fall under prior art?
In their never ending quest to Make The World A Better Place, the do-gooders continue to dig us into an ever-deeper hole Because It's For The Children.
One of the biggest problems with big government solutions to everything is the difficulty involved in making changes as needed. Every decision requires congressional approval, every decision becomes political and once the decision is made nobody has a choice. Public education is a classic example of how such a system loses focus on it's primary reason for existence, i.e. educating children. I instead it becomes a vessel for social engineering experiments and and the political interests of the teacher's unions and politicians du jour.. The children themselves have essentially no representation as the various powers that be fight to further their agendas.
The worst part is that you can't buy or legislate the single biggest predictor of academic success: parental involvement. No amount of money, no law, no program can motivate parents to get more deeply involved in their kid's education. You can not change parents that want to dump their kids and attendant responsibilities onto the school districts.
What do gooders are you referring to? I'm pretty sure that liberals and conservatives (instead of the non-descriptive do-gooders title) both have forced their various agendas on to public education. You then go on to blame the parents, and yet, control of their child's education has been removed from them. Fifty years ago, local school boards managed their schools. Yes, they had agendas, but they were local agendas. Not some state or federal system. The local system was not perfect, but to improve it, it got replaced with today's administration from afar. If you want parents to take more responsibility for their child's education, then you also need to give them more authority.
Of course doing this means that in some places kids will not be taught about evolution, birth control or whatever. It might even mean that some kids won't be academically ready to go to college. That was the system that was in place that educated a nation that was able to send a man to the moon. Education, then was a limited resource, just like oil is today. Back then, you got an education to move ahead of the pack. Today, you need an education just to maintain your place in the pack.
But, I digress. What do-gooders are you referring to and what agendas have they forced?
The problem is, following your reasoning, that taken to its logical conclusion, there will be no manufacturing business left in the United States. Why, because labor is so much cheaper overseas. So, yes, the government could keep out and let wages follow supply and demand. With such a large supply, overall wages decrease dramatically. Then there aren't enough consumer dollars to purchase goods and services, which causes more layoffs and things continue to spiral downward.
Right now, the middle class does not have enough purchasing power to sustain the economy (unless they borrow). The economy requires exporting goods to other countries. As manufacturing shrinks, in the above scenario and in real life, what is available to export decreases, too. Ultimately, there are two choices either we accept high unemployment (and the associated government subsidies) or we all accept a significantly lower standard of living.
There is, actually, a third option. Accept a flat standard of living until the rest of the world catches up at which time amercian labor will be competitive with emerging markets. However, to most people, that would seem no different than a lower standard of living.
Unemployment is at record highs, how many more people would you want out of work if the government hadn't stepped in?
And what happens if Amazon and B&N just say screw it to Apple? Sure, they will lose sales to iPhone and iPad users, but what happens to the luster of an iPad when it no longer can get ebooks except from Apple? Apple isn't the only player in town. There are a lot of android devices, and not just phones out there or coming very, very soon.
What you described is exactly what is supposed to happen in a healthy free market driven economy. It's just the life cycle of a company. What I still can't get my head around is where the US government gets involved in "bailing out" these aging companies. Had we just let nature take it's course, we'd have less major auto manufacturers and the door would be open for innovation - but I guess we have to put that off and wait another several years for the bailout money to run dry.
What you say is true, but leaves out the human suffering that goes along with it. If people were able to freely locate wherever jobs were at the time they were needed, that would minimize the suffering. There is an excellent book titled Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, by Robert Reich that goes into much more detail than I could ever go through here. It should be a must read for every politician and anyone interested in the US's economic growth.
Back when "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", they had an exodus of top talent, too -- just before things went south for the company. Luckily, they were in the process of repositioning them self as a service company instead of a hardware company.
Both companies followed the same "fat-cat" syndrome. Small lean company innovates and captures a large part of the market. As company grows, focus shifts to maintaining status quo. Company becomes too large and lazy (fat cat) to respond quickly to changing environment. Somebody else becomes the new lean tiger. Pattern repeats for new comer. Fat cat isn't just for technology companies. It happens in all industries. It's just that change occurs so quickly in technology companies that instead of taking decades to be toppled, it happens in years. Both IBM and Microsoft lasted longer at the top of their game than most technology companies, but the same forces are still at work.
Back when they were trying to bust up Microsoft for being a monopoly (again, same thing happened to IBM), was when they needed to change. Microsoft had the opportunity to get rid of all competition with Office by improving the product. Instead, they chose to change file formats to try and make the competitors incompatible. That is a very short sighted solution, as it also makes your own installed product base incompatible. Next, they re-did the interface, but still didn't really improve upon the functionality. Next they played around with pricing structures and actually started to remove features, accept for the top end product. Again, not a long term growth strategy. A similar scenario played out with the browser and the OS itself.
Meanwhile, others in the tech industry have been chipping away at Microsoft. Nobody is saying that OpenOffice/LibreOffice will topple Microsoft Office. It doesn't have to. Just like Mozilla, Safari and now Chrome, it only has to take a percentage of small percentage of market share to make a big impact on Microsoft's bottom line.
It's like the prevent defense in football (American Football, that is). It may keep the opposing team from making the big play, but gives up a tremendous amount of yardage in the process. Then, one small mistake and the opposing team scores.
Microsoft, like many before it, has become too large and inflexible to adjust to quick change in the modern market and relies on protecting itself with a prevent defense. The problem with that is that in football, you only need to keep the other team from scoring until the clock runs out. In business, there is no clock to signal the end of the game.
Tools are like slashdot stories. They don't die. They don't fade away. They live on long past their useful life.
In most states, it is now against the law to give your wife so much beer that she services you freely.
What about COBOL and the Mainframe? I've been hearing how they've both been dead since the early 1980s. Surely, with all of the press given to the death of these to tools, they are no longer in use in the new millennium. (He says sarcastically)
Cars appear more efficient from a user perspective for all the reason you mention FOR MOVING PEOPLE. They are actually less efficient but they are more practical for that purpose. However, the actual article, is about moving goods, not people. Cars, electric or not, will never be more efficient than truck, which will never be as efficient as rail for moving freight.
And I'm in a town of 300,000 in the midwest, with over a million people in the metro area. There's a bus stop right in front of my house that I have never once used because it is completely worthless. It doesn't go anywhere I have ever wanted to go. It doesn't go anywhere at anything resembling a reasonable rate of speed. And it costs like $2/trip, which is more than gas and maintenance on a relatively efficient car. Even the bus systems in cities of 2 million people are fairly worthless if you have to commute or need to get someplace faster than riding a bicycle.
It's all fine and dandy to calculate mpg, but your figures are wildly optimistic. A diesel bus commuter service in Santa Barbara, CA, USA found average diesel bus efficiency of 6.0 mpg. At the typical average passenger load of 9 people, the efficiency is only 54 passenger-mpg. So hybrids are already pushing past the average commuter bus efficiency even in purely energy terms, three people in a sedan have been more efficient for a couple of decades now, and motorcycles had them both beat a long time ago. But even if energy efficiency is slightly greater for buses, it is nowhere near worth the time and inconvenience of walking a mile and standing around in the weather for twenty minutes waiting for one to arrive.
Hmmm, the IRS calculates $0.50/mile to operate a vehicle including the cost of insurance and depreciation of the vehicle. That would mean that for $2 a trip, anything over 4 miles saves you money if you don't drive your car. With gas costing $2 to $3 a gallon, it's easy to see your disdain for public transportation (a bus was just an example). When it gets to $10/gallon, like in Europe, then people may view it differently.
Of course car pooling is much more efficient than a single drive vehicle. Too bad most people don't do it. How many married couples each drive their own car into town to go to work.
I check with the local transportation department and was told that the buses here average between 10 and 12 mpg, so that is the figure I used. I'm sure why they are so much worse where you live. However, assuming those 9 people on the bus were going ten miles, then the bus used 1.7 gallons of fuel. On the other hand, if those 9 people drove the 10 miles each in their own car and were able to get 24 mpg, then they would have used 3.75 gallons of fuel. So, even at only 9 passengers, the bus uses less than half the fuel and have the cost per person (10 miles at $0.50/mile = $5 for the same trip by car).
As for having to walk a mile or stand around in the weather, well, when I lived on the East coast, that was the norm. Guess all of those people in NY riding the bus and train just don't know they are doing.
Buses work just fine in rural America. Greyhound goes right through town here. Schools use buses, too. However, it is true that many small towns are so small that they don't have bus service or any other mass transit. In those cases, single passenger vehicles become a necessity, but not because they are more efficient.
Actually, though, a bus with 4 passengers that gets 10mpg would still be more efficient than those four people driving four cars getting 25mpg. To go 25 miles, the first one will use 2.5 gallons of gas, the 4 cars will use 4 gallons to cover the same distance.
For the record, I am in a town of 20,000 in the midwest - we have bus and rail service, but I agree, not everywhere does.
You stated "...that with slower speed limits, I think you'd have just as many accidents (car to car ones at least)..."
However, the actual data shows that at slower speeds there are fewer accidents. I'm not talking about driving 30mph instead of 70mph, but something as basic as 55mph or 60mph.
The reason fatalities drop with lower speed limits are twofold. First, fewer accidents means fewer opportunities to be killed in the accident. Second, slower speeds equates to less force being applied, thereby reducing what isn't absorbed by the vehicle to the occupant.
Advanced technology still does not change the results. Brakes that let you stop in 80% of the time at 70mph, will still let you stop sooner at 60mph, thereby still giving the benefit to the slower speed. Or put a different way, an innovation like ABS works better for all speeds, not just high speeds.
The physics are always the same, slower speed means more time to respond to whatever may be happening.
Confiscation then? And a court order preventing you from purchasing another?
Again, if you are willing to throw out the constitution and the rights it grants, the courts can do anything they want. However, most people would be opposed to creating such a system as they value the rights the constitution gives them.
I agree with this. This is where electric cars are headed. It would make much more sense to abandon high-speed rail in favor of some proof of concept installations of something like this.
Cars are the least efficient mode of transport. A city bus, even though it gets terrible mileage per gallon, is more efficient in transporting people than the best hybrid. Plus, left out of the equation of all electric cars is usually the cost of producing the energy to charge the batteries. California is already realizing that to meet their requirements for all electric vehicles will require major upgrades to the power grid and transmission lines.
VW just announced a hybrid that is supposed to get 261mpg. If it succeeds at that, it will almost reach the efficiency of transporting a person that the current city bus does, but is still a long way behind the efficiency per person of Amtrak or the airlines.
No way about it, cars, transporting one or two people will never be an efficient use of energy.